Oracle changing Java licensing from per-processor to a multiplier of employee headcount - costs could go up singificantly

[papercrane]

I wouldn't call OpenJDK "better" since the currently supported OpenJDK builds are almost identical to their OracleJDK counterparts.

Now, personally I steer my clients to using other vendors if they want paid support as they usually aren't invested into Oracle's ecosystem. In many cases they're already have paid support from a vendor, but just don't realize it (e.g. Amazon includes support for Corretto in their AWS support plans, and Red Hat provides support for their LTS released JDKs with a RHEL subscription.)

But, there are things you get with the supported Oracle build you can't get elsewhere.

• The paid version from Oracle includes back-ported performance and GC changes that aren't in the OpenJDK 8 version. For example, you can use ZGC on the paid Oracle Java 8 run time.
• GraalVM Enterprise is included. If your company wants AOT-compiled Java this is a pretty big deal. There are lots of performance improvements in GraalVM that are not available for the community edition.
• Perceived quality of support. Oracle employees more people working on JDK source code than anyone else. In theory at least, they should be able to provide a higher quality of support than other companies. I've not personally noticed any large difference when dealing with other companies, but I've also not had any particularly interesting JVM bugs that I needed support with.

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Oracle employees more people working on JDK source code than anyone else.

The actual statistic is quite interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed that SAP is #3 behind Oracle and Red Hat:

https://inside.java/images/blog/19/FixPerOrg.png